The Fourth Olympiad London 1908 (extracts)

49 in bicycling and swimming completed the programme for the day. There was not much sun. hine, but the rain of the morning held off during most of the afternoon. ATHLETICS.*' In describing the various events grouped together under the heading of" Athletics," I have chosen the order in which they were printed in the first Official Programme of these Game::;. The winners ame up for their prizes in the same order. As it was impossible for all the competitors to remain in England the whole fortnight, and as this was especially the case with the gymnasts and cyclist , these two divisions of the Games were mostly completed in the first week, during which also the greater part of the field events and the long distance racing (with the exception of the Marathon Race) was carried out. This occasionally led to unavoidable hardship, as, for instance, when a man, in order to win his gold medal, had to win a heat one day and walk in the final the next; or when runners in a three-mile team race had to turn out for a five-mile race on the same day. But such occurrences were not limited to the British team, or to any single nation– ality; and the drawing of heats was guided by the principle of dividing the nationalities as equally as possible throughout; only when the total of the representatives of a single nation exceeded the total of preliminary heats did athlete of the same nation compete in them against each other ; and, in su h cases, all competitors were consider d as lympic repre– sentatives of equal value, their positions in a heat being then entirely guided by the luck of the draw. It wa · fortunate that the numerous heats for short distances in the second week were chiefly decided in fine weather. The sequence of events as actually carried out in the tadrnm was far too complicated to admit of any logical reproduction here · but as it occasionally had a very definite bearing upon results I have printed in the • ppendix the programme for every day, with the names of the officials managing ach event. The weather was unfavourable, on the whole, during the first we k, but much better during the ·econd, and very hot on th, last two <lays. * For the sake of uniformity I have used the phras " United Kingdom" to <le cribe the Briti h competitors throughout this Report. But it is right to say that by arrangement between the A.A.A., the Scottish A.A.•. , and the Irish A.A.A., they were entered in the official athletic programme as "Great Britain and Ireland." D